The challenge for
Julia Gillard
in this federal election campaign is to vanquish the enemies that she helped create.

“For a left-wing party in power, its most serious antagonist is always its own past propaganda," wrote George Orwell in his final notebook.

So grand were Labor’s visions at the last election that Gillard will have to confront them every day up to August 21 to defend the government against the memory of what it said it would be.

All administrations have to defend their records but the task can be harder for a party on the Left, where there is a greater tendency to convince voters that government can be a force for good in the world.

That was
Kevin Rudd
and Julia Gillard’s message three years ago when they suggested they would lower the cost of living for ordinary workers, treat asylum seekers more humanely and reduce the carbon emissions that cause climate change.

Whatever the coalition proposed, Labor offered more. Desperate to succeed after four failed elections against
John Howard
, it turned climate change into a moral crusade and widened the economic debate by promising to keep grocery prices down.

Now Gillard has to give disenchanted voters a reason to stay with her rather than drift back to the coalition.

The campaign begins with most election gauges pointing to a government victory. The latest Nielson opinion poll puts Labor ahead of the coalition by 52 per cent to 48 per cent after preferences are counted, and other polls are showing the same sort of lead.

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Gambling sites, known to be reliable indicators of an election outcome, suggest there is a 70 per cent to 80 per cent chance of a Labor win. For a $1 bet on Labor the sites are paying about $1.25, but they are only offering about $4 for the same bet on the coalition.

Another proven election predictor, economic performance, is harder to read. Interest rates are lower under Labor but unemployment is up and economic growth has slipped since the last election, meaning the government scores only one out of three on the measures that have helped tip elections in the past.

Given the unusual events of the past few years, the government is hoping that at least some voters will give it credit for dealing with the global financial crisis.

The conventional election indicators are so bleak for
Tony Abbott
that his only hope of success is to force Gillard to make mistakes under pressure, as he did with Rudd. Yet the Opposition Leader has only a few weeks to do so and time is on Labor’s side.

Abbott is clearly not the nation’s preferred Prime Minister, lagging Gillard by 35 per cent to 56 per cent in the Nielsen poll. Much is made of his divisive style and the impression, supported by some polls, that he is unpopular with women – especially now that he is up against the nation’s first female Prime Minister.

Yet the qualities that voters are said to dislike in Abbott are those that make him so effective. The Opposition Leader pushed the government into a sort of policy chaos this year simply by refusing to budge from his own position. (Or, to be more precise, sticking to a conservative stance on climate change after months of vacillation).

Malcolm Turnbull
and
Brendan Nelson
failed to wound Kevin Rudd in part because they believed they needed to hold some of the middle ground on climate change.

Abbott sharpened the policy debate and brought Rudd undone using the abrasive style that is so often said to be his weakness.

Can he do it again? Gillard’s recent error on asylum seekers shows that Labor remains vulnerable when confronted directly: the Prime Minister responded to pressure from the coalition by releasing a hasty policy fix and then stumbling over how East Timor fitted into her plan.

The government worked so slowly and cautiously in its early days, commissioning reviews to avoid acting too quickly, that its current policy rush undercuts its own claims about careful management. If Labor MPs are shocked at the speed, imagine how voters feel.

With that sort of prelude, the campaign is likely to be full of costly errors that can only make the coming weeks less predictable than the gambling websites suggest.

After all, both leaders are still getting used to the scrutiny that comes with their jobs. Abbott suggested that only his scripted remarks were the “gospel truth".

Gillard expressed surprise at the headlines she provoked when she said she had not promised a refugee processing centre on East Timor.

It is tempting to regard the campaign as a contest between Gillard and Abbott but there are other forces at work as well.

The government has given up ground to the opposition through the course of this year but its worst losses have been to the Greens. The coalition’s primary vote is not that different to the last election, while Labor’s primary vote is down by about 4 percentage points.

About 13 per cent of voters would choose the Greens first at this election compared with 8 per cent at the last poll, according to the July 10 Nielsen poll.

Gillard is having mixed success countering this trend. Her sudden rise made no impact on the coalition’s primary vote but lured some Green voters to Labor. Over the subsequent weeks, however, some returned to the Greens.

At its greatest, the swing between the Greens and Labor was about 7 per cent of all voters, first one way and then the other. This is a huge group that needs to be convinced that Gillard is better than the alternative. It may only take a fraction of them to unseat her.

Most polls assume that all these voters direct their second preference to Labor but election experts on either side are not taking any chances. The preference flow was no consolation to Rudd, who was despatched because Labor’s primary vote had sunk to around 33 per cent.

There is nothing new for Labor in having to elbow the Greens out of the way in the contest for voters.

It is now 20 years since Labor famously managed to retain federal power on the strength of preferences from voters who chose Labor second. There is a chance this government will echo history.

But what is different this time is the way the Greens are amassing so much support by reminding voters of the contrast between Labor’s grand vision in 2007 and its reality in 2010.

There is an enormous risk to the government that it is acting too late to win those voters back, and that its hold on power relies on an angry and disaffected group of swinging voters who are far less predictable than the conventional wisdom suggests.